Ajay Prakash
Appearances
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
There are good cleaners out there and bad cleaners out there. We're going to work with the best cleaners and let them do what they do best, which is clean the clothes. And then we'll take care of everything else. We're going to help them grow their business. So we get them the clothes to clean. They have rinse technology and rinse processes in their facilities.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
They'll clean the clothes, bring them back to us, and then our valets will deliver them when the clothes are ready.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
Yeah, thank you. I mean, it's been critical since the beginning. I mean, it started with James's upbringing and growing up in the space and wanting to really being on a mission to help the industry. And as we got started, you know, we wrote our core values in March 2013 and the main core value. was Make Mom Proud, which is really an ode to James's mom who helped us out a lot as we got started.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
But the idea there was, you know, whatever you do as you represent yourself and you represent the brand, you know, you should be proud to tell your mom about it. Not just okay that your mom found out about it, but proud to tell them about it And that's a big distinction for us because that's how we want to treat our cleaning partners when we work with them.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
That's why when we brought on valets, we knew that having valets be W-2 employees was not only is it better for the customer because they get a better experience, but it's way better for the valet. They get protection as employees. And frankly, it's been better for Rinse because we deliver a better experience to the customer.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
And we've actually found a lot of our valets have become operators within Rinse and they've taken full-time jobs within Rinse. So You know, I think that idea of doing the right thing has always been pretty important since the beginning.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it certainly evolved over time. I think, you know, when we started early on, the calendar year was less important and it was more about just continuous progress and always doing better. And the way we used to do it was we would say we did 50 stops in a night. We would sit in a room and say, okay, what breaks when we get to 100? Okay, what breaks when we get to 200 or 500?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
And so early on, you're really just trying to manage the complexity and make sure you can navigate it while maintaining an amazing customer experience. We've grown up a lot since then. And so now we're at a stage where what we do is we try to keep it simple. I think there's so many things we could be doing.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
And something I say internally sometimes is there's a lot to do, but we don't have to do a lot. And what that means is that there's only a few things we have to really get right to have a successful year. And so what we have evolved to is at the beginning of the year, we start with a one-page strategy. And on that one-page strategy, we'll have an overarching company goal.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
We'll have a couple areas where there are key initiatives and I like to work in frameworks. There'll be two or three pillars at most and then some core metrics. What we want to do is have kind of this overall overarching alignment across the company. You know what we're working towards. Everyone has a job to do and it's in service of this broader goal.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
And so, you know, last year in 2024, there was a lot of focus on unlocking efficient growth while achieving profitability. That was sort of the overarching company goal or demonstrating profitability. And our pillars were around growth, profitability, and operational excellence. And so it was very clear, you know, if you're working on something, it should be in service of one of those.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
And one of the frameworks I've learned in the past is called it's called this even over framework. When we talk about growth and profitability, they're both really important. But what's more important? And so last year, you know, the internal conversation and the way I described it was profitability even over growth. Right.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
If we have the opportunity to be be more profitable, have the business be stronger, we're going to take that over trying to achieve more on the growth side. As we transition to 2025, we're still putting the final touches in place. And we have all hands next week to start talking about the year and all that. But there'll be a slight change where now it's gonna be growth even over profitability.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
We've demonstrated profitability. We know we're in a good spot, but we still have a lot to do to become that household name and the national brand and really to kind of power all of laundry. And so there's work to be done and we wanna make sure that we're focusing on the right things, but it'll always be kind of,
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
you know, buttoned up into this very simple, easy to digest one page strategy that allows everyone to sort of know, hey, this is what we're going after.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
Yeah, absolutely. We've always been focused on social impact. We've always focused on doing the right thing. We already talked a little bit about helping local cleaners and W-2 valets, but we've also taken clothing donations since the beginning. We've donated several tons of clothes over the years. We've provided free laundry to fundraisers.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
During COVID, we helped get PPE to local hospitals who needed it. So it's always been kind of one-off.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
efforts that you know we when we can find the opportunity we want to do it but but the general core focus has always been well no but we got to grow and we got to become profitable and certainly when there are things like covet it's like well we got to navigate this whole thing but but i think the nice thing is we've kind of earned the right to formalize this and so we're actually we're we're launching a social impact initiative we call it rinse rise where the idea is where can we provide laundry which is our core focus
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
to people where it can be meaningful. And so the first partnership we're kicking off this week is with Barrier Free Living in New York, and it's people who have survived and fled from domestic violence. And so what we're going to do is we're going to provide a few months of free clothing care for them as they're kind of working through that transition. So I'm excited about it.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
It's going to be, hopefully it's a great partnership we can build on, but more importantly, hopefully it's the first partnership of many under the umbrella of Rinse Rise where we can really have an impact.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
yeah i mean i think it is scary it's not for the faint of heart i think it's one of those journeys that is it's it's incredibly challenging but also incredibly rewarding but it's one that you don't want to limp into and so i i think first it's important to understand There's never a good time to start a business with life because you're always busy. Maybe you're thinking about family.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
Maybe there's financial considerations. There's always something that can kind of hold you back. And so I think the key is to really understand if you have conviction and excitement.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
overtaking that leap so don't just kind of limp into it because it sounds cool because it's very very challenging but if you have that feeling you've been thinking about it a lot i would encourage people to just do the work you don't actually have to quit your job and and move somewhere or do something totally different to start learning and seeing whether or not there's something that gets you excited because to me this is about waiting for those bells to go off
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
and knowing that this is the thing I want to actually take the leap with. And so early on, if you're talking to customers, you know, need finding, you're figuring out what your field of play is going to be, what's the area I want to get into, and you're understanding if there's a pain point that gets you excited, you can do that just through conversations.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
You don't have to take massive leaps to do that. And then I think, again, gauge If I'm excited today about something, let me see if it's still in my head. And let me see a couple of weeks later, am I still thinking about that thing? Because ultimately it's not about stepping away and I'm gonna go raise money tomorrow and I'm gonna go build a product.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
There's a journey and you really wanna make sure first and foremost that this is the thing you want to dedicate your time to and take that leap with. And so I think if you're feeling that itch, I also, by the way, the thing that got me to take the leap, there was a great line from a business school professor that stuck with me as I was thinking about this.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
And it's the idea that regrets for the things you do can be tempered with time. Regrets for the things you don't do are inconsolable. And for me, there was this feeling of like, oh, man, I got to do this at some point. I really want to do this. I got to be I got to have that experience. And so if if you have that itch, you want to minimize regret and take a shot at it.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
But I think I think you don't just go in blindly. Right. Be really intentional. Wait for the bells to go off. You know, gauge your excitement along the way. Make sure as you talk to customers, they actually care. And there's you're solving a need here. These are all steps in a longer process.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
Yeah, I mean, it's very different starting a company with someone than it is just being a friend with someone. And so I think one of the things that got me excited and confident with James early on was we had such a long history together that there was a very strong foundation
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
uh value alignment and trust and i think that was really important for me to even want to take the leap but but this this whole founder journey it's it's a lot like a marriage right you get into a marriage because of some initial things that that's that make it seem like there's a really strong foundation but it takes a lot of work and you learn a lot about the person uh as the journey goes uh goes along and so for for james and i early on you know we knew there was implicit trust there uh we both thought highly of each other but we had never worked together
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
And so we spent a lot of time just early on kind of talking about, hey, what are your working styles? You know, what are the what do you want out of this? What are your expectations? Does this have to be a unicorn in a couple of years? Are you trying to build a long term business? You know what? How long can you go without taking a salary?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
There's all these questions that are not like the things that would come out when you're going to dinner with a friend or hanging out. Yeah. So we had a lot of those conversations early on. But I think the key thing has been that the communication, that was sort of the start of really good communication throughout.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
Because what has happened as we've kind of scaled and worked together so closely is we know how each other works. We're very different in terms of our working styles and how we like to receive feedback and how we like to communicate. And we had to kind of learn that. from each other and provide that feedback to know, you know, just like a marriage, you have to know how to communicate.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
You have to know you build the trust along the way and you have to you have to make sure you're really putting in the work and nurturing it. I think that's the important piece. If you lose sight of that, the the foundering journey, the entrepreneurial journey is a pressure cooker and it'll exacerbate any sort of negative things within the relationship.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
So you've got to always be working and making sure it's strong.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
Absolutely. I mean, I think the idea of ruthless prioritization is being incredibly intentional with how you spend your time and making sure whatever you spend your time doing on has an impact and moves the needle.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
It's very easy as a founder or early in the journey to spend a lot of time perfecting a product and not talking to a customer as an example, but you gotta talk to the customers to see if they actually care about what you're building. And so, you know, the one thing that's very kind of constant about a startup is that if you give it 24 hours in a day, it will take it.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
And so as you are building it, you need to be incredibly thoughtful and intentional. And there's always gonna be challenges. I mean, the second you become the CEO of a startup, you're gonna get invited to a bunch of networking events and a bunch of dinners.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
And as you start building your company, you're gonna get a bunch of feedback from everybody about why you should do X or why you should do Y. And it'll come from smart people. And you gotta be really smart about where you're spending your time, where you're placing your bets. And there's also things around...
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
it would be exciting to do certain things that you haven't quite earned the right to do yet. And so, you know, I mean, I found with some of my earlier experiences, we would spend a lot of time doing things that bigger companies would do as opposed to doing the things that allow you to become the big company. And so really focusing on the things that move the needle is super important.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
And so, you know, I think that is the idea of ruthless prioritization is to make sure if you're going to spend time doing this, make sure the things you're doing actually matter.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
Yeah, I'll give you a few. If you're early in your career, I think the main thing I would tell you is that you just need to be excellent. As you are working in your various jobs, just go above and beyond, always be excellent. And what you'll find is that your reputation is going to follow you everywhere you go. And so if you're early in your career, that's really important.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
If you're early as a founder, I think the key thing is you have to be ready to manage your psyche because this is a really hard journey and you have to be willing to ask for help. I've met a lot of founders who, who don't want to ask for help and they want to kind of show this perfect product or show that they already know the answer.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
But the reality is it's, it's just like, just like parenting and raising a kid. It takes a village. You want to lean on that. If you're building and you are a founder and you're kind of building your company, I think one of the things I've learned over time, I like to say is, is fix the roof while the sun is still shining.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
You know, make sure that you actually, when you have capital or you're in a position of strength or you're early on in learning. make sure you actually go after the hard things. The hard conversations are the only ones worth having, and you want to address those things that can hurt you later. And then I think in general, it is an all-encompassing journey. Being a founder, it's very, very tough.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
And we talk about Ruth's prioritization in the job, but I think it's also really important in life. And so one of my favorite quotes that I think helped me along the way is that, in life, you're always juggling balls. Career is like a rubber ball. If you If you drop it, it'll bounce back. So you don't need to necessarily overthink it. But things like family and health are glass balls.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
If you drop them, they break. And so just being really smart and intentional about how you prioritize your time is probably one of the best pieces of advice I could give anybody.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
Thanks for having me.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
Yeah, sure. So I started Rince with one of my best friends from college in early 2013. So it's been almost 12 years now. Wow. At that time, I knew I was going to start a company. And so I was looking at various trends that got me excited. And I kind of narrowed in on bringing technology to old school industries and looking at existing customer experiences that were full of friction.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
And so I was exploring a bunch of different ideas of my own and nothing that got me excited enough to take the leap. And then one day I was getting breakfast with James, my co-founder. And, you know, we had kind of been acting as each other's sounding board, talking about entrepreneurial ideas. And, you know, he's a healthcare guy.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
So I had been putting on my healthcare hat, trying to give him feedback. And he actually kicked off the breakfast and said, hey, before we talk about any healthcare ideas, I can't get this idea out of my mind about doing something in dry cleaning. And it was just one of those moments where, you know, all of the kind of bells went off in my head.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
And I thought, well, dry cleaning is actually perfect for the trends I'm looking at. James was always someone I viewed as a potential co-founder, just didn't have any interest in health care. And then the fact that he had grown up in dry cleaning, actually, his parents were dry cleaners, his aunts and uncles were dry cleaners.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
gave him that unique kind of unfair advantage of understanding how the supply side of this equation would work. And so, you know, we got really excited about it and just spent that entire breakfast talking about what we could do here. He lived in New York at the time. I lived in San Francisco.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
He actually flew back to New York and then a week or two later came back to San Francisco and we set up a test. We picked 11 of our friends. We said, you know, we were going to just try to pick up their dry cleaning and laundry, clean it, bring it back. and see what we learn. James was driving the car. I was in the passenger seat.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
I'd run up to the door as the valet and, you know, get their clothes and special instructions. We took him back to James's parent shop. cleaned the clothes and brought them back. And every one of our friends said, hey, that was awesome. When are you guys coming back? And so we hadn't thought that far ahead. We just wanted to see if anyone would respond positively.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
And so, you know, that kind of gave us the excitement and incentive to keep going. And so we then spent a couple of months just talking to as many people as we could about the last time they did dry cleaning, the last time they did laundry. And what we heard in those conversations, you know, it's effectively the same thing we've heard for the last 11 or 12 years as we built Rint.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
It's just the existing experiences are so full of friction. And it's not one big point of friction. It's all these little points of friction. We call it death by a thousand cuts.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
But what we realized was there's an opportunity to kind of systematically remove all of those points of friction to create a seamless experience from start to finish, a customer centric experience, a technology first experience. And so We worked for a few months and kind of put a circle around three zip codes in San Francisco. And then we launched the service officially in May 2013.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
Well, you know, my approach is a little bit different. So when I knew I was going to start something, my exploration was in looking at the intersection of three things, right? One was the, where am I an expert? One was, where's their market opportunity? And one was, where am I passionate or really excited about it?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
And the expertise thing, you know, sometimes people will say, oh, you know, you have to work in an industry and you have to have this domain expertise for a long time before you can actually start something. And for me, the expertise that I brought to the table was someone who had always worked really long hours, was always really busy and never had enough time to do. the things I needed to do.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
And so all of the ideas I was exploring on my own were around removing that friction that a busy consumer has. And at the time, if you think about when you start a company, people will always look and say, hey, why me? Why now?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
The why now at the time was less about PE thinking about old school industries and more about it was when Uber and Lyft were really exploding and people were looking at their phone as the remote control for their lives. And the iPhone had become ubiquitous. And so there were on-demand companies in every vertical, on-demand car washes, on-demand shipping, on-demand house cleaning, you name it.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
And I think for me, the idea of pressing a button and having something happen was really compelling as a busy professional. And so I was doing my research and I got great advice early on from another founder who said, Hey, as you're working on things, check and see how excited you are. And then a week later, check and see how excited you are.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
And then a week later, check and see how excited you are. And if in the early days you can't maintain that level of excitement when you have to do research on the industry or have people tell you that's a dumb idea or whatever it might be early on, then there's no way you can maintain that conviction for the 10 or 15 plus years it takes to build a real company that's durable.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
And that was great advice for me because I would dive into different ideas and, you know,
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
nothing really got me that excited and I think it was a combination of didn't feel like the right space and I didn't have the co-founder and because I think I knew that I wanted someone to do it with me so dry cleaning and laundry was not necessarily in my sights but James grew up in dry cleaning and so when he brought it up all of the pieces kind of fell into place and then we started working on it and I just I just kept getting more and more excited as we were building and I'm glad I did because now it's almost 12 years later and you know I'm still excited but
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
You really have to maintain a lot of excitement and conviction to weather all the storms in the journey.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
Well, I mean, first, it was a critical piece of understanding whether we want to take the leap. And there's a lot of people who will kind of build the product and they don't want to show it till it's perfect. What you need when you start a company, especially consumer facing, is velocity to insights. You got to move as fast as possible to figure out if anyone cares.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
I don't know if anything surprised us. The biggest thing overall was... people were really excited. And so we knew we were striking a chord and there was something there where people actually cared about what we were building. And I remember James saying for him, one of the big aha moments was, People actually paid us. We didn't do this for free.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
We charged them that cost, so we didn't make money, but they actually paid us for the service that we literally took a week or two to kind of get set up. But what we did is we learned a lot in the process. We tested morning, we tested evening, we tested during the day. And as an example there, if you're five minutes late in the morning,
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
you're ruining someone's day because they got to get out the door. If you're five minutes late in the evening, nobody cares. And so there were little insights like that that were really helpful. But the biggest thing was, do people want this? Is this actually solving a pain point? And then kind of learning in that testing, what are some of the things we need to really nail?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
Like, oh, that experience at the door for the valet is important. Oh, when you take, like I found, we had a bunch of random laundry bags and we picked up people's clothes and we wrote their name on a piece of paper and the service type and we threw it in there. And I found after two or three customers, I couldn't remember whose bag was who.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
So it gave us the sense of like, wow, this is operationally gonna become really complicated. And so you gotta build the systems to be able to manage that. And those, those were little nuggets we learned early on, but the biggest thing was, Hey, people really want this. This is exciting. And so that kind of led us into that need finding and the journey to say, okay, let's go build this.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
It has been rinsed since after that test. And I'll tell you, you know, I had experience at the time with consumer startups, with the last startup I was at, and also with a lot of the on-demand companies that were coming out.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
What we found was there were companies that were, you know, either spelling a word wrong, like Lyft, you know, Lyft with a Y. That's the only company I think that survived that. But there was a company called Ship with a Y, and there was a bunch of those. Or there was a lot of .io's or .ly's.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
The vision here has always been to build a household name, to build a national brand, to build a durable company. And I had spent years in consulting and private equity working with great companies, and I had seen that. And so it was really important for us to find a word that worked. And so we did the search around what's going to be the core root word. Is it wash? Is it press? Is it fold?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
And we found that actually there were a lot of domain names available. with Rince at the time. Rince.com was not yet available. But what we did was we, in the test, we called it Rince Me. That was just like a placeholder. And we got feedback from people that that wasn't a very good name. The URL originally, when we launched in May 2013, uh, was rinsed now.com.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
That's where we put a landing page up, but we were really, you know, after we knew we were going to do this, James and I went back and forth a lot on this. Could we create the name without the domain name, but it was all in service of this brand that could become a national brand and a household name. So yeah,
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
So we were very intentional about calling it Rinse, about making it a word, about making it something that actually made sense. And then shortly after we launched, we actually were able to acquire Rinse.com. And that was an investment where we said, hey, that's a no brainer because we're not trying to be the biggest dry cleaner or laundromat in Pacific Heights.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
We're trying to be a national and global brand. And so we got to make those investments up front.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
Yeah, absolutely. You can sign up at rinse.com. You can download the mobile app. If you're an existing customer, you press one button on the mobile app or you text the letter Y and then our valets who are all W2 employees will come to your door between 8pm and 10pm and they will pick up your clothes. If you're a new customer, you get personalized rinse bags.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
And if you're an existing customer, you already have those bags. We'll pick them up. We'll take them, we'll do a bunch of stuff with them. And I'll tell you about that in a second. But then the plan is we'll just bring them back to you. If it's laundry, it's next day. If you pay for next day service, otherwise it's in a few days and it's folded.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
If it's laundry, if it's hanging and pressed, if it's a dry cleaning. On the operation side, it's pretty complex. You know, I think the way we look at this space and this industry is that getting started, the barriers to entry, pretty easy, right? James and I did it within the first week or two of talking about it, but the barriers to scale are very high. because there's so much complexity.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash
So what our valets will do is they'll pick it up, they'll bring it back. We have a central hub in all of our markets. We're in 10 major markets across the country right now. And then we work with local cleaners to clean the clothes. And for us, there's always been an element here of wanting to help local cleaners grow their business and being very thorough and saying, hey,